Free Mawrdew Czgowchwz by James McCourt Page B

attitudes and idiosyncratic expression.
    The Countess Madge ran over her cue lines, there at table, and yet not at all there—drinking whiskey and gobbling walnuts. Meanwhile, the company zoom-focused on Tangent Percase urging some metaphoric congruence between Neri’s fans anticipating the Norma farewell and the perennially fated Scandinavian lemmings on their frantic progress to the sea (“oblivion-as-mendacious-memory,” in Tangent’s tortuous analogy). Eyes were suddenly seen shifting in varying directions all about the table. Everyone seemed to be trying to look elsewhere. (Consequently, in the given limits of the spatial district, there were collisions.) Murmurs developed; there were yawns, scarcely stifled. Paranoy pressed Percase to change the subject.
    Ralph seemed to be mouthing silent oaths, but not in any protestation against the Percase rhetoric. His thoughts fled all the while to a certain patiently wrought manuscript (unilluminated just as yet, but not forever) which now lay on an occasional table in the parlor. The time would come. Ralph munched walnuts, preparing.
    Lavinia and Jameson communed across the table. The Countess continued mumbling mummers’ imprecations. Pierrot sampled the Stilton and the sage Derby. Sipping Guinness, he relaxed in ruminative bliss.
    Sooner than had been expected, the snow stopped falling. The sky cleared to a stagy indigo. “Argent moonglow” (Percase) split through spaces created by flung-open drapes. The common session ceased. Everyone made for one window or another, colliding each with each in room-to-room progresses, causing gentle routs and reconnoiters. What Alice somewhat awkwardly described as “a rash of stars” burst out in deliberate earnest, driving the company, sooner than had been planned, into Magwyck’s back yard. Somewhere on high, as Consuelo Gilligan observed, Sagittarius was giving way to Capricorn. G-G reared her head in thoroughbred fashion. Alice shrugged and went back indoors to the oval mirror in the parlor, stopping off at the sideboard to pour herself a “who cares?” bourbon and spritz, no ice.
    Lavinia, Jameson, Carmen, and the remaining Secret Seven set about building some sort of snow totem in hilarious secrecy behind the tall hedgerow of yew directly behind the O’Meaghre dolmen. Their giddy, screened labors continued in noisy concert, to some moment...
    Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh retired to the music room with Merovig Creplaczx, Arpenik, Dixie, Contessa Cassia, Pierrot, and the Countess Madge. The Countess took up the psaltery, but did not play. She continued mumbling odd old fragments of ritual responses. Merovig did play: a thing of his own: strophic, nocturnal, sarabandic, fugal. Coming back indoors, Carmen took out her knitting and sat Calypso-like in a cozy cocoa baignoire fauteuil opposite the door. Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Dame Sybil listened (standing) to Cassia’s ironic kvetch on the subjects of finance, politics, gossip, and fiction (its demise). Dixie and Arpenik exchanged knowing notions relative to the concoction of herbal soups, antelope stews, aphrodisiacs, and flower wines.
    Merovig finished. He rose to accept a genial if distracted applause from the select audience in the music room, and paused. Feverish laughter could be heard quite clearly through shut windows all the way from behind the yew hedge behind the O’Meaghre dolmen. Carmen giggled, “Mah deah, the carryings-on!” The Countess wondered if again: the neighbors ...the police... Memories of former encounters over the years flooded in from the same back yard. One from the summer just past demanded special review. At the summer-solstice back-yard amateur night, Ralph, forecasting the eventual Neri collapse, had plunged into a travesty rendition of Morgana’s “ D’amor sull’ ali rosee ,” accompanying himself on the hurdy-gurdy barrel organ (some actual